


Little Brother

by leftofrevolution



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: F/M, Family, Imprisonment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-08
Updated: 2015-02-08
Packaged: 2018-03-11 01:57:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3311312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leftofrevolution/pseuds/leftofrevolution
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six weeks after her sentencing, Kuvira gets a visitor in prison who refuses to hate her as much as she knows she deserves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Brother

It had been three months since she had surrendered to the Avatar, two months since the beginning of her trial, six weeks since her sentencing, and two weeks since anyone had come to see her, Korra being her only regular visitor and currently on a vacation with the Sato woman in the Spirit World. The only people she interacted with at all during those weeks were her guards when they came to bring her food twice a day, and they had no incentive to be talkative.

She should have been lonely. Perhaps she was—it had been a long time since she had not spent most of her waking hours surrounded by people—but if so, it was buried under everything else. Guilt, mostly. Grief for what she had lost ( _gave up, sacrificed, destroyed beyond any hope of repair_ ). Anger that she wouldn’t admit to if anyone asked, that everything had gone so horribly wrong, that good intentions apparently meant nothing. Boredom.

There was a lot of boredom. Korra had been sweet enough to bring her a few books, but with nothing else to do but read and exercise in her fifteen-foot-by-fifteen-foot cell, those had lasted her mere days. And if she was accustomed to being surrounded by people all day, she was even more used to being productive, ending each day having accomplished something new. She had been in prison for six weeks and she was already starting to go stir-crazy. Actually thinking about the twenty years of this that lay before her—and that was if she was lucky—made her seriously start considering the feasibility of clawing her way out of her cell with her nails.

 _You chose this_ , she reminded herself, far more frequently as time went on. _You surrendered to the Avatar. Even after that, you had the opportunity to flee with some of your followers and you didn’t take it_. It was amazing how little that helped as one week dragged on into two without her having heard the voice of another human being, feeling her life slip on by with nothing to mark its passing.

She forced herself through an exercise routine daily regardless, if only because it gave her something to do that left a mark, even if it was only on herself. She was halfway through her pushups on day fifteen since she last saw Korra when someone knocked twice on the door to her cell before it creaked open and someone walked into the room.

She didn’t look up—it was about time for her second meal of the day and it wasn’t as if paying attention to the guards’ comings and goings made any difference—until she noticed that though the door had quickly closed after opening, it had not opened again so that the guard could leave after putting down her tray of food.

She looked up, expecting to see Korra—who admittedly wasn’t due back from the Spirit World for another two weeks, but who else could it be?—and nearly felt her elbows give out at the sight of Huan, looking down at her with his usual grumpy expression. “Hey,” he said, as he had a thousand times before back in Zaofu, as if he wasn’t standing in the presence of the woman who had imprisoned him, torn down the walls of his city to make a weapon of mass destruction, then used that same weapon to try and murder most of his family.

“Hey,” she said back numbly, only belatedly pushing herself to her feet. They stared at each other for a while. She felt like she should be doing something with her hands, but crossing them or clasping them behind her back as she usually did would look aggressive, and she felt like she should be trying to get past that as her default. Huan looked unimpressed, but that was almost reassuring; he had never looked anything but, not even when they had first met and she was eight and scared and trying not to show it and he was four and already refusing to let anyone cut his hair or tie it back, letting his bangs hang messily in his eyes as he frowned up at her, displeased with the world but at the moment with her especially. Not even when Suyin had shouted at him, her first metalbending child—back then her _only_ bending child, before Wing and Wei had proven themselves prodigies—for refusing to learn how to fight. Not even when she’d had him dragged away by Earth Empire troops to be locked up for the crime of refusing to kneel at the Great Uniter’s feet had he looked anything more than piqued at the troops’ audacity for touching him.

Back then—even when she had longed for a sparring partner around her own age who had at least a vague hope of keeping up with her, even when she was announcing him as a traitor to the Earth Empire—she had thought it almost admirable, his unwillingness to conform even when good sense dictated otherwise. A sign that despite his decidedly un-Beifong penchant for pacifism, he had as much steel in his spine as any other metalbender.

Now she didn’t know whether to curse him or praise him for it. “Why are you here, Huan?”

He shrugged. “I wanted to see you.” He unslung a bag from his back, letting it drop to the floor with a _thump_. “And I brought you some stuff.”

She watched, still feeling numb, as he rifled through the bag’s contents, pulling out first a small pile of books—the top one at least was about art theory, which was almost comforting in its predictability—then some paper, brushes, and ink, and finally a Pai Sho board on which he dropped a small bag full of tiles. She stared at the bag of tiles.

“They’re wood,” Huan said flatly, as if hearing her unspoken question.

“I didn’t know they made those,” she said, trying to match his disinterest.

“They don’t,” Huan replied, and he sat himself cross-legged on one end of the board before dumping out the tiles. They were, as Huan had said, wood—she could sense no trace of the usual ceramic or stone in them at all—but beautifully carved and lacquered. Every tile was carefully engraved with its respective flower—each depicted with more realism than was standard for Pai Sho—before being painted. It was actually the most handsome Pai Sho set she had ever seen, and she’d grown up in Zaofu. Nonetheless, Huan was still scowling down at them as he arranged them carefully on the board. “I started making them after your sentencing, but I am not used to wood as a medium.” He _tched_ as he held up a Jasmine tile; in the bright light of her cell, she could barely make out that one of the petals was slightly more angular than the others. “Shoddy work, but I’d taken too long already to come visit you, and I didn’t want to come empty-handed.” He finished setting up the board before looking up at her expectantly.

She obliged, sitting across from him at the other end of the board, but not without saying, “You don’t even like Pai Sho.” She tried to evoke some of her old teasing lilt, but instead it came out sounding raw.

He shrugged, not seeming to notice. “You do.” He had set up the tiles such that he had the opening move and was in the process of studying the board as he said, “You taught me how to play, remember? Since mom and I were fighting about my metalbending training and you thought that Pai Sho would help us make up.”

She remembered, though not in such flattering terms. Baatar had been caught up in his engineering apprenticeship with his father, none of her other peers wanted to talk to her that month since she had too-enthusiastically crushed them all in a series of sparring matches, and Huan had been undemanding company, mostly content to sit to the side and write or paint as she went through her katas. When she had asked him why he hadn’t been coming to dinner lately, he had blithely mentioned his argument with his mother, and she—despite privately agreeing with Suyin about the waste of having a metalbending Beifong who didn’t want to learn how to use it in combat—had suggested that perhaps Suyin was just looking for something for them to bond over and gotten her Pai Sho set out, just excited to have a chance to create another enthusiast when most of Zaofu was convinced the game was old-fashioned and boring.

Huan had learned the basics more-or-less grudgingly over the course of the next few months, but by the time he was proficient enough that she was willing to deem him worthy of playing Suyin, he had convinced his mother that utilizing his metalbending in pursuit of the arts was much more in line with Zaofu’s mission than just churning out another fighter and had told her that he didn’t need her instructing him in Pai Sho anymore. She would have pushed the issue except that her peers were talking to her again by that point, so she had let it drop. She had not noticed or cared that much at the time about the sudden end to their brief period of closeness. They both had better things to do, and he’d never really shown the same enthusiasm for the game as he had for his art projects. Just one more regret, in the end.

Or maybe not, because here was Huan thirteen years later—frowning in that way he did when he was concentrating most fiercely on a new sculpture—before finally sliding forward one of his Rose tiles and looking across at her through his hair. “Your turn,” he said unnecessarily, when she didn’t immediately start contemplating her own move.

She kept her eyes on him, regardless. “Why are you here, Huan?”

He frowned at her, this time confused. “I told you. I wanted to see you.”

“Why?” she said, hoping some of her incredulity was apparent on her face.

He shrugged. “You’re my sister.”

She couldn’t quite manage to stifle her laugh. “‘Sister?’ If Suyin could hear you say that after what I did to you and your family…”

He shrugged again. “So you’re my sister who acted like an asshole. That doesn’t mean the sixteen years before you left never happened.”

“Suyin-”

“If mom actually believed that,” Huan interrupted tersely, “Baatar Jr. would be in a cell right next to you instead of working off his own fuckups through community service. She’s a hypocrite, and once she stops being angry about you walking away from Zaofu and thinks it through, she’ll realize that and you’ll get out of here.”

She could only shake her head. “Suyin never saw me as a daughter. She won’t fight for me like she fought for Baatar.” Maybe one day, that wouldn’t hurt even more than her failure did, even if her relief that Baatar had survived was still so strong that it left her feeling ridiculous, considering it was despite her best efforts. “And if Opal and the twins ever saw me as a sister, they certainly don’t now.” She moved a Lily tile forward listlessly, not really paying attention to her placement. It wasn’t as if it mattered.

Huan frowned at her some more before returning his attention to the board. “Say you’re right. Say mom never gets over herself and Opal and Wing and Wei never stop holding a grudge and dad doesn’t find the guts to go against mom. Then it’s down to me and the Avatar and Baatar Jr., so it might take a little longer, but-”

This time it was her turn to interrupt him. “What are you talking about?”

“The Avatar’s been visiting you, right? And I overheard her talking to Aunt Lin about thinking you’re genuinely repentant. If the community service thing with Baatar Jr. works out, she’ll be an easy sell on letting you out on a trial basis.

“Baatar Jr.’s already halfway to forgiving you, even if he hasn’t admitted it to himself yet. He’s already justifying you trying to kill him as ‘necessary from a strategic perspective’ whenever mom tries to talk shit about you not loving him, even if he does look sad most of the time, so apparently a decade of being wildly in love with you is a hard habit to drop. I give him another month before he starts trying to figure out what your cell conditions are and another two on top of that before he begins arguing with mom about it being unfair that he’s walking around free while you aren’t.”

It was kind of pathetic how much that warmed her heart; logically speaking, she should feel nothing but scorn for a man who would grant her forgiveness for attempting to murder him for no better reason than love, except for the fact that it was coming from the person she wanted it from the most—even more than Suyin’s, whose goodwill she had long known to be conditional for anyone she didn’t consider family—and she’d take it in whatever form she could get it.

Huan wasn’t done, however, and continued with, “So I’d give it a year, at most two, before you’re walking out of here.”

That, even more than anything else Huan had said thus far, made her blink. “That- I can’t.”

Huan slid forward a Chrysanthemum tile before looking at her again. “Why?”

“I need to serve my debt to society.”

“By sitting in a wooden box,” said Huan, unimpressed.

When he put it that way, it didn’t sound terribly noble. But still, “It was what the jury decided.”

That just made Huan snort. “And since when have Beifongs ever let other people dictate how their lives will go?”

At that, she had to smile, even as she said dryly, “It’s thinking like that which got me stuck in here to begin with. And I’m not a Beifong.”

Huan shook her head. “Listen: you’re getting out of here. And then you can help fix some of the damage you caused, and you and Baatar Jr. can make up and get married, and Avatar Korra and I will bear witness even if no one else will, and then no one can ever say you’re not a Beifong ever again. But even without that, you’re my sister, and you don’t deserve to rot away in here when all you were trying to do was what you thought was best.” He didn’t say any of this with any noticeable passion; instead it was factual, which was worse, because at least with some passion she could have convinced herself that it was an imposter. But it sounded like Huan, and it looked like Huan, and no one else blew their hair out of their face in quite that way, and no one else would ever _think_ to hand carve her a set of Pai Sho tiles, which left-

“Hey, are we playing Pai Sho or not?”

If Kuvira’s smile was a little wet, Huan was kind enough not to comment. “Of course we are.” And they did.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know. I just think Huan expressed remarkably few feelings about the whole Earth Empire thing despite being clearly opposed to it. And that Suyin is a hypocrite. And I really liked this artist's art focused on the Kuvira/Baatar Jr. pairing: http://terra-7.tumblr.com/tagged/legend-of-korra.


End file.
